Skyline rivalry # 2

News reaches us from the Mipim property show in the south of France, where yesterday Norman Foster unveiled plans for a pair of 323 metre-high skyscrapers in Paris. 

Strangely, Foster & Partners claim in their press material that the towers, intended to create a new community to the east of La Defense, would be the "tallest mixed-use towers in western Europe". But this list of Europe's tallest buildings suggest that they would be Europe's highest buildings - mixed-use or not - and by quite some distance.

At a height of 323 metres, Fosters' buildings would be more than 50 metres higher than Europe's current tallest skyscraper, the Naberezhnaya Tower C in Moscow, according to the list. For the record, London's current tallest building, 1 Canada Square stands at just 235.1 metres high and the Shard of Glass, which sparked a heated debate on this blog when its construction contract was signed last month, will be 310 metres tall.

Whether or not you believe that London needs more tall buildings - and personally I don't - it is striking from the list of Europe's tallest skyscrapers that the capital is not even  close to being Europe's tallest city. A quick analysis of the list, which ranks Europe's tallest buildings 

over a height of 140 metres, reveals that Moscow has the most tall buildings in Europe (23). Istanbul and Paris both have 16 buildings that are taller than 140 metres, while Frankfurt has 13. London, with just 12, trails in a distant fifth.

Benidorm (pictured above right), meanwhile, has four buildings that are more than 140 metres tall - more than Manchester and Liverpool, which both have just one.

Sustainable Cities

Strange scenes just now at Cabe’s sustainable cities launch as graffiti fever took hold of the delegates. 

Top dog at Make Architects Ken Shuttleworth spoke on what the view from the 31st floor of London’s Centrepoint tower teaches us about green construction.



Ken, who designed the iconic Gherkin building for Foster and Partners before leaving to start Make, ran the length of the room scribbling on the windows with a marker illustrating, sometimes literally, what London had and didn’t have in terms of sustainable attributes.
 
For the record, Ken says the capital lacks birds, vegetable patches and well designed buildings, except, I can assume, for the Gherkin.
 
But Shuttleworth left his biggest bombshell until the end of his speech.

Centrepoint tower, picked by Cabe to host the launch this greenest of documents, is Grade 1 listed and as such will remain evermore a single glazed structure. It was basically, Ken said, a “huge energy guzzling box”. 

Skyline rivalry

We've just heard that the construction contract has been signed for the Shard - an 80-storey beast of a skyscraper that would replace the Southwark Tower near London Bridge station just across the water from the City.

The promoters are keen to point out that the building would feature the highest home in the UK. But before it is even built, it already has a potential rival, a so-far unnamed tower designed by Herzog & de Meuron that press leaks suggest will have a penthouse 900 feet in the air that boasts views of the English Channel. Not bad - after all people who claim they live in London and have a seaside view are usually residents of Brighton who are talking to Americans.

This cheeky one-upmanship from the construction industry is encouraging in a recession. It can only help London come out of this slump consolidating the position it had jockeyed for when we went into it: as the capital of the world. Some in New York would dispute that of course, but even many across the Atlantic concede London looks better value for the title.